SMART PEOPLE (15) *

DIRECTED BY: NOAM MURRO

STARRING: DENNIS QUAID, SARAH JESSICA PARKER, ELLEN PAGE, THOMAS HADEN CHURCH

CONSIDER that title for a second: Smart People. It's supposed to be ironic, buts it's more than a little smug. Immediately championing itself as an intelligent and sophisticated film for intelligent and sophisticated audiences, it's a wonder the marketing department didn't just call it "Come and see this if you liked Sideways, Juno or Wonder Boys". Granted, that wouldn't be very subtle, but nor is Smart People, since the "smart people" who saw those aforementioned movies are exactly the viewers its title has been designed to entice. Too bad it also writes a cheque that this tediously plotted, desperately contrived and resolutely middlebrow movie cannot cash.

It's not that Smart People – starring Dennis Quaid as a widowed college professor whose dysfunctional family life is thrown for a loop when romance unexpectedly enters the frame in the form of Sarah Jessica Parker's ER doctor – is a bad film. It's that it's an awful one, its sheer hideousness amplified tenfold by the self-satisfied way it flings around literary references, discussions about the precise use of language and banal, overly-polished witticisms about life and love in the most obvious way imaginable. Watching it unfold is like being confronted by one of those jumped-up morons from Dragon's Den who have deluded themselves into believing they've cracked the genetic code for happiness when all they've really done is come up with something useless, like a glove for a door knob.

Don't believe me? Here's the earth-shattering theme at the heart of the movie: bookish, intelligent people are – wait for it – not always so smart when it comes to matters of heart. That's it. That's all there is to "get". That's the profound, truth-essaying concept that's supposed to have eggheads everywhere swooning with delight. It's doesn't exactly take a high IQ to grasp does it? Indeed, the fact that the film's tag line also spells it out in bold letters ("sometimes the smartest people have the most to learn") hints at its true audience: pseudo-intellectuals. In other words: this is a smart movie for dumb people.

Unforgivably, it's also a film that wastes a very strong and appealing cast with weak storytelling that barely gives anybody enough material to propel them into the next scene, let alone through to the end of the movie. Quaid is the most ill-served here. Hidden beneath a mop of greasy hair and a bushy beard that's become movie shorthand for "professorial", there's no mystery to his teacher, Lawrence Wetherhold, an arrogant, curmudgeonly, occasionally infirm-seeming grouch who hates himself and his job.

It's clear from the outset that grief over his wife's death has intensified his pompous, arrogant ways and turned him into a bitter misanthrope who can't be bothered to learn the names of his students or even make an effort to remember their faces. This grief has also turned him into a pretty poor father. His son (with whom the film barely spends any time) harbours vaguely defined feelings of resentment towards him and he's allowed his strait-laced daughter, Vanessa, to take over the role of dutiful wife and mother by letting her run the household, flatter his vanity and fight in his corner instead of encouraging her to enjoy the remainder of her childhood.

Played by Ellen Page with the same kind of snarky, wise-beyond-her-years surliness that made her such a joy in Juno, Smart People somehow manages to drain the life out of her in a way that suddenly makes the actress seem far too old to be playing high-school students. Or maybe that's just because she's been asked to play a Young Republican who idolises Dick Cheney and has a photo of Ronald Reagan above her bed. Such character quirks are doubtless intended to be satirical, but it's a measure of how artistically conservative the film is that it never comes across this way.

Such conservativeness extends to the patchy, toothless way it attempts to add some edge to proceedings by having Vanessa form an oddly sexualised bond with her father's adoptive brother, Chuck (Thomas Haden Church). It feels thoroughly out of place, coming out of nowhere and heading in pretty much exactly the same direction. Chuck, a gauche, fun-loving layabout, arrives on the scene after Lawrence has an unexplained seizure resulting in a six-month driving ban. Broke, Chuck offers to become his brother's chauffeur and moves into their house. The film provides no particular reason for his presence and Chuck and Lawrence's sibling relationship is barely explored. It's as if he's on hand purely because someone thought the film needed a wise-cracking salt-of-the-earth type to enliven proceedings.

Parker, whose character, Dr Janet Hartigan, enters Lawrence's life when she treats him for his seizure, is used similarly. Though the film informs us that a decade earlier she'd been one of Lawrence's crush-struck pupils (which rather implausibly puts Parker's age in the film around 30), there's no chemistry or urgency to their nascent relationship. Her character seems to exist purely because debut director Noam Murro and first-time screenwriter Mark Poirier know that in films of this nature, audiences expect resolution and rehabilitation to come through love.

Thing is, these elements need to be woven together in a cohesive way to make them connect. A smart film would make it seem instinctive, not force its hand or try to flatter our intelligence with surface details and meaningless pomp. Smart People should practice what it preaches.

CHARLIE BARTLETT (15) **

DIRECTED BY: JON POLL

STARRING: ANTON YELCHIN, ROBERT DOWNEY JR

PROVING once again that Rushmore is the most influential American indie film of the past decade, here's another quirky, offbeat high-school comedy that cribs from Wes Anderson's classic – as well as from Thumbsucker, Election, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Pump Up the Volume (among many others) – without offering anything new. No, scratch that: Charlie Bartlett does at least take the novel approach of making all of its characters unlikeable, although director Jon Poll and screenwriter Gustin Nash seem to have happened upon this strategy by accident rather than design.

They certainly seem to expect us to identify with and like the film's titular rich kid hero (played by Anton Yelchin), an eager-to-please legend in his own mind who, after being kicked out of yet another private school, endears himself to the student body of his new low-rent, publicly-funded place of learning by supplying his classmates with prescription meds and psychiatric evaluations.

With a zonked-out mother, and a father in jail for tax evasion, we're supposed to view blazer-wearing Charlie's behaviour as symptomatic of a society full of ill-equipped adults whose failure to take responsibility for their offspring has spawned a generation of disaffected, Ritalin-addicted kids. Any points it has to make about these issues, however, have already been made more effectively in the more serious teen films from which Charlie Bartlett steals its ideas ensuring that, as it works through its designed-by-committee plot that ticks every box marked "out-of-the-box thinking", all we're left to root for is a gangly, slightly creepy kid who probably deserves every beat-down he's ever received.

And don't be swayed by the presence of Robert Downey Jr either. As the alcoholic headteacher of Charlie's new school – and the disapproving father of the super-smart Goth girl upon whom Charlie forms a crush – old Iron Man has little to do except run through his usual tics and tricks, which, while briefly diverting, aren't rooted in a plausibly-written character, thus feel more tired than inspired. In the end, it's a bit much to expect us to have compassion for the characters' myriad quirks and foibles when its makers clearly have none.

HEARTBEAT DETECTOR (12A) ****

DIRECTED BY: NICHOLAS KLOTZ

STARRING: MATHIEU AMALRIC, MICHAEL LONSDALE

SUBTLE, gripping and devastating in its implications, Nicholas Klotz's masterful corporate thriller plays out like a dramatic reimagining of Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott's chilling documentary, The Corporation. That film psychoanalysed the behaviour of modern-day multinationals to conclude that if they were people they would be psychopaths. Heartbeat Detector takes this a stage further by having a corporate psychologist by the name of Kessler (played by new Bond villain ) gradually unravel as he delves into the murky history of the German-owned, French-based petrochemical company he works for. Ostensibly asked to assess the mental health of the company's increasingly erratic chief executive (played by the great Michael Lonsdale), over time Kessler comes to the painful realisation that his employer's corporate ethos is uncomfortably close to the policies of the Third Reich, with his own skills – in particular his abilities to come up with criteria to make things run more efficiently by weeding out undesirables – forming a key part of their profit-motivated final solution. Densely layered and richly symbolic, Heartbeat Detector may occasionally be difficult to read, but its enigmatic qualities only add to its power and the quiet, haunting finale will leave you reeling.

SHUTTER (15) *

DIRECTED BY: MASAYUKI OCHIAI

STARRING: JOSHUA JACKSON, RACHAEL TAYLOR, MEGUMI OKINA

CAN we please call time on Asian horror remakes? Most weren't that good to begin with and Hollywood retooling never improves them. Shutter – based on a Thai rip-off of The Ring – may well be the worst so far, though I've not seen One Missed Call, which, I'm reliably informed, just has the edge. This one stars Joshua Jackson and Nicole Kidman-clone Rachael Taylor as newlyweds Jane and Ben. The latter is a professional photographer and, as the film opens, they're moving to Japan so Ben can take up a new job with his old agency in Tokyo.

They're in Japan for all of five minutes before a tired Jane runs over what appears to be a young woman, and the scene is set for another groaningly obvious fright-free tale involving a malevolent wraith tormenting the living for wrongs visited upon her in the past. In this instance that means popping up in the background of every photograph they take, the explanation for which involves much chat about emotional energy being captured on film. That Shutter contradicts such a concept with every frame is an irony to which no-one involved seems attuned.

CARAMEL (PG) **

DIRECTED BY: NADINE LABAKI

STARRING: NADINE LABAKI, YASMINE ELMASRI, JOANNA MOUKARZEL

PLAYING out like a Lebanese, female-oriented version of Ice Cube comedy Barbershop (only with less emphasis on gags and more on metaphor-heavy drama about menopause and infidelity), Caramel revolves around the lives of several women who frequent a beauty salon in Beirut.

That setting certainly gives first time actor-writer-director Nadine Labaki's film a unique perspective, offering up some cultural insights into the plight of women in a hypocritical patriarchal society that expects them to protect their virtue at all costs (one of several interlinked plot strands involves a woman debating whether to have hymen-stitching surgery to avoid having to admit to her husband that she's no longer a virgin).

In all other respects, however, this is an unexceptional, pedestrian film, full of pretty visuals (Labaki's background is in commercials and music videos), stock characters and meandering stories that have little urgency. The title refers not to the sweet we all eat but to its other use as a leg-waxing material, which while clearly being intended as a metaphor for the pain women endure for in the pursuit of temporary beauty, also serves as a good metaphor for the experience of watching the film.

OUTPOST (18) ***

DIRECTED BY: STEVE BARKER

STARRING: JULIAN WADHAM, RAY STEVENSON

FILMED in the south of Scotland but set in an unspecified part of war-torn Eastern Europe, Steve Barker's low-budget Brit horror is a good-looking if somewhat derivative splatterfest that makes a determined effort to build some atmosphere before letting rip with teeth chiselling, eye-gouging, skull-squishing gore. A race of Nazi ghost soldiers is the main selling point as a band of grizzled mercenaries – led by a weary Ray Stevenson – provide protection for a businessman covertly investigating a bunker that was once home to sinister German experiments during the Second World War.

Once the bunker is disturbed it doesn't take long for some Third Reich evil to be unleashed, although Barker sensibly doesn't reveal its true nature until quite late on, letting panic set in as these hardened squaddies are picked off one by one. It's a silly premise, of course, and well-worn, too, having already formed the basis for Michael Mann's flop The Keep and been recycled twice in recent years by Brit horror flicks The Bunker and Deathwatch. Nevertheless, Barker makes inventive use of limited means and once the horror kicks in it is reasonably satisfying.

WELCOME TO THE STICKS (12A) *

DIRECTED BY: DANNY BOON

STARRING: KAD MERAD, ZOE FELIX, DANNY BOON

EARNING an astonishing $200 million at the French box office, Welcome to the Sticks is the biggest hit in the country's history, something that defies belief given that it's little more than a groaning fish-out-of-water comedy.

In an effort to save his marriage, postal manager Philippe (Kad Merad) puts in a transfer request for the Riviera, but when he doesn't get it he pretends to be disabled to jump him up the list, which results in his transfer to a region in the north of France much mocked by the rest of the country for being cold, unpleasant and populated by hicks who are curshed wish an impenetrable Sean Connery-shtyle vocal shlur. To his surprise, he warms to the place and its eccentric population, but when his marriage starts benefiting from the 700-mile commute, he pretends to his sympathetic wife (Zoe Felix) that he's miserable to prevent her joining him.

With subtitles a poor way of conveying aural gags, the parochial humour gets lost in translation. Still, with characters this lazily conceived, there are plenty of similarities with below-par Brit-coms to make it feel depressingly familiar.